Paul Kalina

Maiden voyage: Wake Up on Ten was sold on the hook of its beachside setting. Photo: Twitter via @wakeuponten

Back then, it was all about controversy and dust-ups, albeit ones specially manufactured for TV. The bus-shelter posters said it all: Andrew Rochford’s hand covering the mouth of Paul Henry, the blowhard shock-jock-styled Kiwi broadcaster recruited by Ten chairman Lachlan Murdoch.

The show lasted until November 2012, five months after co-host Rochford had quietly departed the show. From the choice of host to the set, a couch adrift in a clutter of outback paraphernalia, there was an air of desperation about Breakfast that the public never got over.

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The couch has been replaced with a compact and simple desk, the seat formerly occupied by a 50-something conservative now shared by three casually dressed, younger, more tempered and more appealing hosts — Natarsha Belling (“Tarsh” in TV vernacular), former Australian Idol presenter James Mathison and Natasha Exelby (“Tash”) — behind whom a large window overlooks the sun rising on Sydney’s northern beaches.

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Wake Up is one part breakfast show with all the requisite tools — news, weather, sport, celebrity gossip, cross-promotional plugs, previews of the coming day’s big events — and one part The View-like chat show, the hosts and guests primed with a handful of ready-made talking points.

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The show was largely sold on the hook of its beachside setting and being the only morning show with localised news, with Nuala Hafner delivering the headlines and weather from a studio at Melbourne’s Federation Square. A counterpunch, one imagines, to the accusation of Wake Up being too Sydney-centric.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside ... Wake Up delivers tempered show.

In the end, though, it plays to the morning TV rulebook, geography less important than conviviality, chumminess and a running-sheet that ensured that the viewer didn’t suffer too much repetition (though a moratorium on the phrase “the race that stops a nation” when introducing the obligatory Melbourne Cup item might be in order).

From the get-go the trio knows the roles they are meant to play. Mathison and Belling shared traffic-cop duties, while Exelby, the plain-talking Queenslander with an accent that could scare off Kookaburras, seems to have been handed the job of taking a stand on the topic at hand and polarising opinions.

Not that the maiden show’s water-cooler debates were ever going to scare the horses or ignite the flame of controversy that Paul Henry failed to do.

The 6.30am tease — a “message” for Catholic archbishop George Pell, poll mayhem in Western Australia and a couple of reliable chestnuts for the clickbait era, is it okay to drink alcohol in front of children and are men redundant? — never matched the delivery. According to Wake Up, Clive Palmer, on balance, is good for Australia, the Catholic Church is out of step with the realities of contemporary family life and children can’t be shielded forever from taking responsibility for themselves.

Save for those who think that it’s a sin to be a single mother or that equal opportunity shouldn’t be extended to women, it was all very sensible and level headed. Will one of Wake Up’s hosts or guests eventually proffer the view that women shouldn’t be seen breastfeeding in public? Possibly not, but if or when the discussion will rise above the comfortably bland remains to be seen.

Outside of the studio, reporter Sam McMillan (“Sam Mac”) was happy to take the piss out of his brief to capture the pulse of what’s happening in Australia. There’s real buzz out here, he said from the near-deserted street outside the Wake Up studio.

In the end, Wake Up is less the promised game-changer that will revolutionise the breakfast-TV genre than a corrective for a past corporate mistake. But with the right handling, it’s also a carefully crafted charm offensive that will get Ten back into the breakfast-TV market.